Known plow guide troughs or plow guide elements are used especially in underground mining, in the case of, for instance, coal mining plows. In such cases, the plow guide troughs are mounted on the working-face side on conveyor pans of a chain scraper conveyor for removing coal plowed off the longwall face by the mining plow. The length of the plow guide troughs is equal to the length of a conveyor pan, and the chain scraper conveyor and the plow guide may be formed by joining numerous substantially similar plow guide troughs and conveyor pans by tension-resistant bendable coupling means in the form of toggles, respectively. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,641,286 B2 and 7,188,441 B2 relate to plow guide elements of a plow guide for guiding a mining plow.
In modern heavy-duty plow systems, the mining plow may be mechanically guided on a top guide rail and a bottom guide beam, both respectively provided at each of the plurality of plow guide troughs and axially aligned to one another, respectively. The mining plow may include, for example, two bottom guide members, known as guide skids, that rest on a slideway also provided at each of the plow guide troughs. The slideway may project over the bottom guide beam. The two bottom guide members may engage the bottom guide beam by, for example, by at least partially encompassing the bottom guide beam in a U-shaped manner.
During operation of the mining plow running along the chain scraper conveyor back and forth, the top and bottom guiding members of the mining ploy may be subjected to wear. Especially the bottom guide members are highly stressed, since the bottom guide members support the whole mining plow against the ground. For replacing one of the worn bottom guide members by a new bottom guide member, it is known to disassemble one of the plow guide troughs for getting access to the worn bottom guide member. However, in case of two bottom guide members, a further plow guide trough has to be removed for replacing the other worn bottom guide member by a new bottom guide member. Such maintenance work of replacing all worn bottom guide members may be time-consuming and, thus, may lead to less efficiency of the whole mining device, since no extraction work can be performed during the maintenance work.
The present disclosure is directed, at least in part, to improving or overcoming one or more aspects of prior systems.